From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-11-20T17:47:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby screen scraping

Hola,

>> In Ruby, writing normal code is so easy that the traditional cautions
>> against adopting miraculous libraries should be amplified tenfold.
> 
> I hope you're not arguing that HTML should be parsed with simple regular
> expression instead of a real parser.  I think most would agree with me
> when I say that strategy seldom holds up for long.

I could not agree more with James here. HTML scraping is one of the most
tedious tasks these days. Paul, how far would your scraper get with this
'HTML':

<p>This is a para.
<b/>
<p>This is another...

With Hpricot, this code

equire 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

doc = Hpricot(open("1.html").read)
results = doc/"//p"

works without any problems.

Of course I absolutely understand your viewpoint, but messed up HTML, as
you have seen, can make a real difference...

Peter

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